Tag: dream geography

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Writing again

Demolition Dreams

Science says everyone dreams. I know for sure I do, recurrently and lucidly. Every night I explore a growing collection of dream locations and have adventures with people who are like but not exactly like the people I know in waking life. It’s a regular entertainment, and one I participate in. I even have a tag for the times I blog about the weirdness in my head.

The landscape grows and changes according to its own logic. I haven’t dreamed about lake monsters eating misbehaving campers for a long time (for example)  but the lake still shows up. It’s connected itself to the ocean near where my family once vacationed in Florida somehow. The cast changes too, as I meet new folk and old acquaintances pass out of my life, but some dream-people have stuck with me for decades after their day counterparts moved on.

I always know I’m settling into a life change when it first shows up in my dreams. I was happy when the library showed up (working the front desk on a weekend while some huge city event happened outside and a crisis drives everyone indoors.)  My cast of dream companions still includes a lot of Borders alumni, but the library’s appearance in my dreams means that I’ve settled into my new home in reality. Borders is nearly five years gone now. The library is taking its rightful spot in the work zone of my subconscious.

I do still dream about Borders, though. My favorite one revolves around spending Christmas Eve in a store open to customers at night in a blizzard while still under construction. Believe it or not, that’s not a nightmare. Dramatic, challenging…but somehow not nightmarish.

I dreamed that store last night, but this time my Borders buddies and I (Spouseman is one of them in my dreams, although he only worked one holiday season ages past)  weren’t putting the store together and training staff. We were breaking it down, removing hardware and boxing up books against an apocalyptic backdrop of broken walls and rubble-covered floors. The hotel where we stayed had a huge heated pool but no electricity. (Dream significance. That struck me as highly important, although I cannot explain why.) We were the recovery team, there to save what we could and then make our escape with as many employees as we could rescue.

The shift from construction to demolition probably means something deep in my emotional bedrock is shifting too. Probably. The important takeaway is this: after all these years my dreaming brain is still going on new adventures and taking me with it.

Time: 12:10 PM
Tea: Ginger’s Oolong
Steep: 9 minutes. I got carried away.

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Writing again

Weirdness & Storms

Okay, my dream geography is getting weirder and weirder.

I suppose that’s normal for dreams.

ANYway.

So in this dream I’m in Richmond Indiana, where I spent some formative years. This Richmond isn’t that Richmond. DreamRichmond has a highlands north of town with a bunch of little hotels and strip malls along a highway, and the city itself is in a low valley. There are a bunch of interstate junctions (I-74, which used to be US 40 in my dream, and I-13, which I think I’ve made up, and I-70, which is real) and tons and tons of traffic. But it is Richmond. I know that.

I’m staying in a hotel on the highlands near one of the highways, with a team of other people. We’re doing some kind of project in the downtown, which is a preservation area with old Victorian buildings and small-town shopfronts and so on. For some reason I’m out driving and there’s a horrible, horrible storm. I can see it coming as I’m going down the steep hill past the lake — you know, a huge broad lake that looks like an ocean, the kind of lake Richmond doesn’t have — towards the downtown.
Like this, only scarier.

There’s a big dark blue-gray sweep of angry clouds dropping rain in a veil behind me, and there’s a tornado in that rain. I can see it swirling down and around and getting closer and it’s all but panicking me. The weather catches up, and it’s much too nasty to drive, no visibility, pounding rain, lightning, thunder, and I’m scared so I stop at the first chance I get.

The only place I can stop is a casino, one of many all in one area — you know, the casino district Richmond doesn’t have — and these buildings are all in a big curving row like a huge wall of brick and neon lights that go on beyond where I can see them. All of them have little pull-in areas like hotels, but no one wants to let me park, so I park illegally across from the entrance of one and go inside. The first is an MGM casino, the next a Harrah’s. I know this because I go wandering through the buildings, which are all connected.

Hardly anyone is inside, and it’s eerie, so I keep walking because for some reason I’m not allowed to stay in any of the places until I reach this one little cafe-like area where a bunch of ill-dressed vagrants are hanging out drinking coffee and waiting for buses that never come. They keep grumbling about it.

I finally get reception on my cell phone so I can call for a pickup, and one of the guys on the team comes to get me and we retrieve my car, but it takes us a long time to get back because of all the storm damage, and it’s now freezing cold.

And then I wake up to Paul’s alarm clock. Is there a deeper meaning to this dream? Unlikely. It was entertaining, though, and I keep thinking about it. There’s probably a story in there, somewhere.

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Writing again

Some Days Are Sleepy

Some mornings have dreams that suck me into them so deeply that I hate to leave them behind.  On the morning that this dream hit, I kept rolling over and closing my eyes again.

This one started with a new area, much like US Route 14 in Palatine, IL, but all in dark grays and overcast and gothic buildings with much narrower streets. My Dream Companion and I were students and living there and trying to run away from something, so we went into a tavern there, where we met and talked with two priests, one of whom had an amazing resemblance to Karl Malden.
We had to leave, and we were running through the rain with our dogs (did I mention that we each had a big dog?) and then there was a crash in the bedroom as the blind rail fell off, and I woke up. Grrr.

I went back to sleep, and fell into a relatively new part of my dreamlands, with a house much like mine, but somehow larger on the inside, with a huge yard and grass like the family cottage up north, lots of trees and some landscaping I’ve done in previous dreams. Same neighbors too, at least in this dream.

My dream family, a large, extended one that I don’t really have, is part of the aristocracy but very, very poor (due to backstabbing political betrayal) and have been working hard to hide it for decades, much to the frustration of our foes. One sibling is long gone in trade, others are keeping up the facade, and it’s my chore to upkeep the house and make it look livable even though it’s not. 
Family comes by to get things out of storage for a big trip to where we can regain our proper place, (I think it involves space travel but can’t be certain) I think meeting the long-departed sibling was part of the plan, but in any case I was to be left behind again. Then a HUGE storm came, and I had to drag Bruce the Cat (who died years ago, BTW)  out of the backyard into his porch (a much bigger porch than we really have, one with complicated doors) and we were trapped there for some time by the rain and lightning, until one of the people from the packing group comes and helps me back inside, and then Paul’s alarm went off and I woke up again.

Rolled over. Closed eyes.

 Returned to the dream, and I’m finally allowed to to leave the house and go to school, where there is a boring lecture going on, but then questions are asked about complex rank issues and politics, and I get involved in a very catty vicious conversation with several peers, and the professor keeps me after class, where I defend my actions, and she turns out to be an ally.
We make some plans to get me settled and protected, which involves a visit to a strange man with an amazing resemblance to Roy Scheider, who lives in a weird underground place a bit like the original House on the Rock. He seems to be an ex-adventurer of some kind, retired and in seclusion, but my professor convinces him to assist. I demand money and support and am provided with same, along with a shower and bath on the first working bathroom I’ve seen in ages (what with the house falling apart ad all) and that’s where I wake up for the last time and decide a real shower would be lovely since it’s  long past time to get up.

It’s nice when my dreams stay sequential enough to explain in detail, even when explanations never quite capture the feel.

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Writing again

Dreams & Ideas & Other Musings

Sometimes I can recognize the inspirations for my dreams, other times they are delightfully random. This one falls into the second category.

This one begins with a crowd of friends & acquaintances in my backyard, all recognizable as such, so I expect Big Strangeness. First, dream geography rarely intersects reality sharply enough for me to say, “it looks like my backyard.” More often I just know it’s my backyard despite total physical dissimilarity. Second, I don’t have enough friends to make up a crowd, and few acquaintances visit my home even when invited. Dream crowds are usually composed of a Bunch of People whose identities are simply Known; they have the comfortable feel of friends, but sadly I never meet them in waking life.

Immediately after this dream begins, precisely four squares of my patio collapse in the course of a huge earthquake that fails to cause any other damage to my large quiet neighborhood of tree-lined streets and expensive houses.

That’s when I know it’s going to be a really entertaining dream.

The falling patio squares crush one friend’s witchy mother-in-law. What this woman was doing underneath the patio tiles in the first place is a conundrum best left to my unconscious, but dead she is, and the sinkhole has a slippery rim of hard grayish slate or shale; the exact composition is a matter for some discussion. The death of the MiL is quickly dismissed. The earthquake and the sinkhole have our attention, as according to the news on the TV, which we can hear outside even tho’ it’s in the basement, the cave may be Important. Dream news is much more timely than real news.

Of course I Make the Brave Gesture of entering the cave first. What are dreams for, if not to exercise one’s curiosity? Paul (Dream Paul, who looks nothing like the man I love, but who is, nonetheless Paul) wants to go, but he has to stay on top and talk to the police, who are Interested in what’s going on, and who are Calling Higher Authorities.

Despite the sinkhole’s creation as a straight-down drop, the slope is much more like a limestone canyon carved by water, and it’s lit by a diffused foggy yellow light like a darkroom. Of course it’s lit. This is a dream. Only Real World Caves lack illumination. Hollywood caves have mood lighting. Why can’t mine?

The bottom of the cave goes on for a long way past my patio. Who knew my backyard was such an interesting place? Once I get down the rocky steps and around a corner, I can see bones. Lots of bones, all laid out in perfect fossil skeletons of interesting critters like mammoths and long necked sea beasties and little bird-like critters. I can’t see all of them clearly due to my flashlight’s limited range. (darn that dream lighting….)

the most exciting find: a chunk of glacier that juts from the cave wall nearest my house. (Well, why not? It’s a dream cave. No one says it has to be governed by petty laws of physics.)

Preserved bodies are starting to emerge at the periphery where the ice has begun to melt in the warmth. (Did I mention it was summertime? We were out on the patio after all.) I recognize a mammoth and a couple of prehistoric people and fish right away.

Everyone becomes greatly excited, because fossils mean research and celebrity and riches for all of us. Then Rhyan points out that we might have a problem. See, while I was concentrating on looking at all the bones and bodies and such, I failed to notice the live prehistoric Neanderthals sneaking around behind me and climbing up out of the cave.

The cave people aren’t hostile and they’re not stupid even if they are Neanderthals. They aren’t interested in us; they run away into the neighborhood, which is now a city in that twisty-scene-changing trick dream geography can play.

The earthquakes and other Unnamed Disasters have wreaked havoc on the buildings here. Much worse than at the house. We all, as a group, track down the Neanderthals, since we somehow know exactly where they’re going: a park. With swingsets and slides and suchlike.

Turns out, once we catch up to them, that they speak modern English. (Of course they do. Why not?)

Apparently we need to remodel our house to make them happy. So…we do. We get the Neanderthals settled back in their cave, and everyone helps work on the house and the yard, and after everything’s Fixed and the Scientists are done examining the cave, we close up the patio tiles, and the Neanderthals go away with the scientists.

I have no idea what happened to the dead mother-in-law. Kinda bugs me, but not really.

Strange, strange, strange.